This invention relates to an apparatus and method for supplying a continuous feed of fabric material, handling the material, cutting the material into pieces and transporting the material to a subsequent work station.
By the term "fabric", as used throughout the specifications and the claims, it is intended that that term include both woven and nonwoven fabric, webbing material, film, such as plastic film, reinforced and unreinforced, such as polyethylene film, and sheet materials, all supplied in a continuous form.
This invention particularly relates to an apparatus and method for supplying nonwoven web fabric such as that used to produce caps as described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,820,484 to William M. Neill and George A. Burt, Jr. of June 28, 1974, incorporated herein by reference to illustrate the utility of the invention and to provide additional detail as to the apparatus and method of this invention.
A particular problem in continuous manufacturing operations utilizing pieces of fabric, is to handle the material from large rolls, which are an essentially inexhaustable source, cut the fabric into pieces and move them to a subsequent work station where later manufacturing steps are taken, such as that of the Neill patent described hereinabove.
In particular, the large rolls of fabric are extremely heavy, are not necessarily balanced or of even tension, and in any case vary substantially as to the pulling power necessary to pull the fabric off the roll as the amount of fabric remaining on the roll decreases. These large rolls have a tendency to be harder to get started rotating and then difficult to stop when the material is being pulled off on an intermittent basis. Thus, an uneven supply of the continuous fabric to a cutter is a problem that had not been solved.
In addition, certain types of fabric and in particular the nonwoven, lightly structured, almost diaphanous material used in the Neill patent is difficult to handle to maintain a smooth uniform positioning during the cutting process and later handling processing of the cut pieces. These problems as well as others illustrated later, constituted a great need to allow the developments of the Neill patent and like continuous processes to be fully developed into an operational production apparatus and method.